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Observing the Ouse: Excavating the deep history of the Cambridgeshire Fens
The Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) has been excavating sites along the banks of the River Great Ouse since 1994, keeping one step ahead of sand- and gravel-quarrying that is steadily transforming the landscape from solid ground to a series of lakes that will eventually form a large nature reserve. Chris Catling reports on the latest volume to emerge from this project, which brings together a series of excavations exploring a c.5km length of the river at the point where it enters the Fen marshlands near Earith in Cambridgeshire.
Entitled A Book of Sites (see ‘Further reading’ below), this new CAU volume adds to some 20 previous monographs and more than 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals reporting on large-scale fieldwork in the Cambridgeshire Fens, which began in the 1990s. Excavating such a large area brings its own rewards in understanding the impact of human activity on an entire landscape over several millennia.
Straightening and embankment work that began in the 17th century means that the River Great Ouse today looks like a single watercourse. In prehistory, however, this was a braided river with numerous islands and ridges that were bounded and sculpted by the river’s multiple palaeochannels. The m
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